Abstract
In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the most convincing account of this argument, see Boghossian (1989a).
- 2.
This needs to be said because there exists a similar criticism of causal explanation in the social sciences that provides similar arguments for such a rejection (cf. Winch 1958). In contrast to this criticism, the point here is that even a causal explanation will need to account for some features of the background and will need to understand what their ontological status is in order to be able to explain them causally or otherwise.
- 3.
Cf. also the convincing criticism by Carman (2003: 120f.)
- 4.
Baker and Hacker (1984), McGinn (1984), Boghossian (1989a, b), Blackburn (1984). Even though the interpretation that the rule-following problem has been given by Saul Kripke is controversial, his reconstruction of the main reason against a dispositional theory of rule-following – the lack of an explanation for the normative embedding of rule-following – captures an important thought of Wittgenstein: in following a rule, an individual’s action must be understood as taking place in a normative context which cannot be explained by reference to a causal story about the individual’s behaviour.
- 5.
- 6.
“Es liegt im Begriff des Subjekts, sich zu beziehen [..] Existieren besagt dann unter anderem: sich verhaltendes Sein bei Seiendem” (Heidegger 1975: 224).
- 7.
“For Searle, that something else is the Background […] For Heidegger, by contrast, the something else just is being-in-the-world, where this is not a collection of (non-intentional) mental phenomena. Indeed, being-in-the-world is a kind of intentionality that Heidegger sometimes calls ‘primordial intentionality’” (Cerbone 2000: 275); see also Blattner (2000: 234).
- 8.
“But to the extent that we understand our thinking mechanistically, we have to understand it outside of any context of engagement” (Taylor 1993: 323).
- 9.
This is basically the point of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity (Heidegger 1979: 114 ff.).
- 10.
“Die ‘Beschreibung’ der nächsten Umwelt, zum Beispiel der Werkwelt des Handwerkers, ergab, dass mit dem in Arbeit befindlichen Zeug die anderen ‘mitbegegnen’, für die das ‘Werk’ bestimmt ist” (Heidegger 1979: 117).
- 11.
The conception of “Sorge”, which I only discuss here in its intersubjective dimension, is easily misunderstood as a psychological phenomenon. Heidegger, however, intends to point to a formal characteristic of the embeddedness of intentionality in the world (cf. Gethmann 1993: 70ff).
- 12.
“Das Man-selbst, worum-willen das Dasein alltäglich ist, artikuliert den Verweisungszusammenhang der Bedeutsamkeit” (Heidegger 1979: 129).
- 13.
- 14.
Compare with the notion of “Zerstreuung” (Heidegger 1979: 129). As a result of this underdeveloped account of intersubjective relations, Heidegger’s model has been analysed, for example, by John Haugeland (1982), as a conformist model of a social background, meaning that the background is constituted by second-order dispositions which regulate the conformity of our primary dispositions with those of others. However, the obvious problem with this account, namely that it loses again the distinction between the normative force of the rules and the entirety of the actual behaviour of a community (cf. Brandom 1994: 36), disqualifies this from being a model which could solve Searle’s problems with the background. Additionally, this model would be susceptible to Searle’s criticism of Kripke’s sceptical solution, that is, to the objection that an unproblematic account of “agreement” is presupposed rather than explained (cf. Searle 2002).
- 15.
Schmid (2005: 261) distinguishes between institutional and non-institutional aspects.
- 16.
This is, again, similar to the understanding which John Haugeland proposes in Haugeland (1982) but which is too specific to be evaluated here. I think that there is some criticism to be made not only of his interpretation of Heidegger but also of his understanding of the background as behavioural-conformist – a problem he shares with Heidegger (cf. Stahl 2007).
- 17.
Cf. the equation between “Verfallenheit” to the world and the “Man” in Heidegger (1979: 175).
- 18.
A standard authority is an authority which has a default-and-challenge structure, as, for example, described by Brandom (1994: 176).
- 19.
Read this way, we can avoid the finitist, conventionalist misreading of Wittgenstein that McDowell (1984) attributes to Wright: in normal cases, persons can directly apprehend the meaning of a rule (or an expression) without depending on communal agreement. However, the normativity of rule-following, although not reducible to the “bedrock” of dispositions, still depends on the defeasibility of the authority of any disposition which itself can only be explained by a background of interlocking attitudes. This does not reduce meaning to the background, but it spells out which background is necessary for there being instances of rule-following in a more concrete way than McDowell’s quietism allows for.
References
Baker, Gordon P., and P.M.S. Hacker. 1984. Critical study: On misunderstanding Wittgenstein: Kripke’s private language argument. Synthese 58: 407–450.
Blackburn, Simon. 1984. The individual strikes back. Synthese 58: 281–301.
Blattner, William D. 2000. The primacy of practice and assertoric truth: Dewey and Heidegger. In Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity. Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, 231–250. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloor, David. 2001. Wittgenstein and the priority of practice. In The practice turn in contemporary theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina Karin, and Eike von Savigny, 95–106. London: Routledge.
Boghossian, Paul A. 1989a. The rule-following considerations. Mind. New Series 98(392): 507–549.
Boghossian, Paul A. 1989b. Review of Colin McGinn: Wittgenstein on meaning. Philosophical Review 98(1): 83–92.
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making it explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heidegger’s analytic: Interpretation, discourse and authenticity in being and time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cerbone, David R. 2000. Proofs and presuppositions. Heidegger, Searle and the ‘Reality’ of the ‘External’ world. In Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity. Essays in honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, 259–278. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert. 1991. Being-in-the-world. A commentary on Heidegger’s being and time, division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert. 1993. Heidegger’s critique of the Husserl/Searle account of intentionality. Social Research 60(1): 17–38.
Gethmann, Carl Friedrich. 1993. Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln. Heidegger im phänomenologischen Kontext. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Haugeland, John. 1982. Heidegger on being a person. Noûs 16(1): 15–26.
Heidegger, Martin. 1975. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1927). Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1979. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
McDowell, John. 1984. Wittgenstein on following a rule. Synthese 58: 325–363.
McGinn, Colin. 1984. Wittgenstein on meaning. An interpretation and evaluation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pettit, Philip. 1990. Affirming the reality of rule-following. Mind. New Series 99(395): 434–439.
Schmid, Hans Bernhard. 2005. Wir-Intentionalität. Kritik des ontologischen Individualismus und Rekonstruktion der Gemeinschaft. Freiburg: Alber.
Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality. An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. 1995. The construction of social reality. London: The Penguin Press.
Searle, John R. 2002. Skepticism about rules and intentionality. In Consciousness and language, 251–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stahl, Titus. 2007. Practices, norms, and recognition. Human Affairs 17(1): 10–21.
Stroud, Barry. 1991. The background of thought. In John Searle and his critics, ed. Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick, 245–258. Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor, Charles. 1993. Engaged agency and background in Heidegger. In The Cambridge companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, 317–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Theunissen, Michael. 1977. Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Winch, Peter. 1958. The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Zettel, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wrathall, Mark. 2000. Background practices, capacities, and Heideggerian disclosure. In Heidegger, coping, and cognitive science, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, 93–114. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stahl, T. (2013). Sharing the Background. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5599-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5600-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)